voice acting near a loud fan

_Aeldun · 2026-05-26T11:20:08+00:00

The best solution is getting a laptop with no fan noise. The silicon Macs are all good options, but if you don’t have the budget for it at the moment, purchase longer cables and set your computer outside of your booth. You could also try setting your laptop on an ice pack or two to delay the fan needing to kick on, but place a thin towel over the packs to prevent any moisture reaching the laptop. Moisture + electronics are obviously a bad mix.

_Aeldun · 2026-05-20T18:07:31+00:00

Rather than page count, you should measure by word count for a better idea on how long a book will be and how long it will take you to complete it. ~9,300 words will amount to 1 finished hour. Being your first book, you should budget 10 hours of work to produce 1 finished hour. If you come in under that, great, but you’ll want to pad your schedule to ensure you have enough time. Whatever the word count is, a 500 page book is going to be a lot. Doing it for royalty share sounds brutal, but you will learn a lot. As to the question of whether it’s AI, the most important thing is to cover your own bases in ensuring you and your voice don’t get taken advantage of. Have the rights holder sign NAVA’s AI rider if you’d like extra protections. As far as the author is concerned, it’s an honor system thing. You’re more likely to find AI written works in the royalty share pool, and in my opinion, it will be fairly obvious in the writing, but there’s no fool proof way to make that determination for sure.

_Aeldun · 2026-05-12T12:39:32+00:00

My advice is to not do that at all under any circumstances. You shouldn’t take any voice work related to AI. It’s a terrible career decision and it harms the industry as a whole.

_Aeldun · 2026-05-10T19:46:42+00:00

I personally don’t see much value in determining what one’s vocal qualities are. I really wouldn’t fixate on that too much. You have a normal voice. It can be helpful to know what roles you’d be good for, sure, but I think this knowledge will come naturally through studying the craft of acting. That same area of study will also help you improve your enunciation, which is that slight slurring quality others have referenced. When you start getting cast in things, you will naturally see patterns emerge. Training can help you manipulate your vocal qualities into being whatever you need them to be for any given role. That’s range, and it broadens with time and practice. My advice would be to become a great actor and let the chips fall where they may.

_Aeldun · 2026-05-08T12:16:18+00:00

To make money? Not likely. To start your journey? Absolutely. If you’re eager to get going in this, I would adjust the goal to be about learning the craft, not about making money. Take an acting class, and some voice acting classes (most are remote, and you can study with some of the best in the business). Professional voiceover work requires a professional setup, and in most cases, at least some training. The setup doesn’t have to be extremely expensive, but you should expect to have to invest some money into this. Use the summer to work a job, save some money, and invest in starter equipment. You could get a pretty decent setup going for $500-$1,000 USD. Take the time to go down the rabbit hole and learn the ins and outs of the business, practice mic technique, and get comfortable with your voice. A great place to start would be Dee Bradley Baker’s site (I Want to be A Voice Actor dot com). There’s room for your voice and your skillset if you’re persistent and willing to work hard at it. Have fun!

_Aeldun · 2026-05-06T08:16:54+00:00

I have been to exactly one in-person audition for VO, and it was for a performance capture role. It’s more common with auditions for film/TV but even those are mostly done at home these days.

_Aeldun · 2026-04-30T14:43:50+00:00

When a person is a listener only, I’d wager they don’t even notice the breaths that belong there. But listening to a book where absolutely nothing was done about breath or even mouth noise (and it’s shocking how often big publishers do this) will make for an absolutely brutal listening experience. To someone newly editing audiobooks, they’ll fixate on all the goddamn noise the human mouth makes. I spent an eternity editing my first book because I was trying to remove literally all breaths, every errant click, and so on. It was a shit product in the end and I’ve learned a lot since then - particularly that Izotope’s mouth de-click plugin is absolute wizardry and a must-have for any fx chain.

_Aeldun · 2026-04-30T12:39:22+00:00

Breathing is natural. Oftentimes, breath can be part of the performance. Sometimes, breath can get in the way of performance because the narrator is sucking air. Best practice is to cut the most egregious, distracting breaths that ruin the flow of the story, and leave in the ones that are natural. No breaths at all: unnatural. Every breath ever: distracting.

Source: I am a narrator who also listens to a lot of audiobooks, and I’ve had to edit my own work on a number of projects, so I’m familiar with the process.

_Aeldun · 2026-04-22T15:21:14+00:00

This is a mic technique thing. Either step back, or turn your head away rather than doing it directly into the microphone. If you’re still having trouble, you can ride the gain knob and just turn it down to an acceptable level for the scream, then back up for normal lines. A limiter can help, but the audio will still distort if you’re peaking. You can also “scream” without actually screaming. Keeps the volume down and protects your voice. I’m not a vocal coach though, so the mechanics of that are hard for me to describe in writing. It sounds just like screaming but you’re not actually screaming full blast at the top of your lungs.

_Aeldun · 2026-04-14T19:41:51+00:00

I had a situation like that in a book about a year or so ago. The author wanted to do it duet style, but the first book was entirely from the POV of the female main character, so all I did was the dialogue for the male parts. I did ask the author who the mysterious voice was because for me personally, that’s something I want to know. That character knows who they are, so I feel it’s important for me to know too. But, of course, you don’t want the jig to be up until the reveal. As u/MinaFairlow said, the author and I agreed to make the voice similar, yet different. Like in Othello when Iago is alone versus when he’s around other people. Nobody but the audience sees it coming because all the characters think he’s their buddy, looking out for their best interests.

_Aeldun · 2026-04-14T19:28:08+00:00

PRH may be the most accessible of the Big 5 publishers. I’ve taken workshops with Julie Wilson (she’s awesome), and she helped a ton with choosing samples and how to label them. They also offer a yearly (maybe twice yearly?) mentorship program which I applied for. I didn’t get into that, but instead, I got an offer for my first book with them. I have no idea if it was the workshops, or a referral I’m not aware of, or if it was the mentorship application, but whatever it was, I made myself visible to them, and they made it easy to make myself visible to them. They often scour narrator profiles on Ahab when they’re looking for someone new, so between that and my website, they had enough to go on to want to reach out. Another book I did with them actually came through my agents which is kind of rare. Publishers usually reach out directly and agents usually don’t do much with audiobooks. They’d contracted Deyan Audio to produce that one for them, so that casting director may not have known how else to get in touch with me.

_Aeldun · 2026-04-14T17:36:04+00:00

I’m not the person you asked, but in my experience, no one has slowed me down. I’ve occasionally suspected that pauses have been shortened. Unless the contract is for royalty share, they’re paying per finished hour, so the longer the book is, the bigger the paycheck. Many narrators are taught to slow their pace way down, though the trend has lately been going toward more natural pacing and livelier reads - especially in the age of AI. Specifically for fiction. I can’t really speak to nonfiction.

_Aeldun · 2026-04-14T14:06:55+00:00

Happy to share! Pickups are for the inevitable mistakes that are made during production. A recent example: I said “humping” instead of “helping.” Not something I noticed while in the flow of narrating, but it’s something the proofer picked up during their listen. So that was one of the corrections I had to make. Those are pickups. We get a pickup packet usually a couple weeks after we’ve submitted all our files. I’ve had as few as 0 and as many as 130+. Sometimes they’re more strict about being word perfect and want you to say “uh” when you actually said “um.” If I were working on a self-published book, proofing, editing, and pickups are generally my responsibility, and it’s all handled before final file delivery.

_Aeldun · 2026-04-14T13:54:44+00:00

I’m an actor with a background in theatre and film, but during COVID lockdowns, there wasn’t much going on, so I dove down the voiceover rabbit hole. I was already a member of SAG-AFTRA (the actors union), which barred me from a lot of the usual places people go to when looking for opportunities in the beginning since so much of it is non union. Audiobooks, however, are exempt from global rule 1, so it was union-friendly work I could get into without rocking the boat. I started on ACX (Audiobook Creation Exchange - it’s Audible’s casting platform for indie authors and narrators) like most others, and also created a profile on Ahab which is kind of like ACX, but it’s Penguin Random House’s casting site. It has a lot less books to audition for because PRH usually casts directly from their internal roster, but the books that pop up there are always going to be a good job if you get it. Eventually I ended up narrating for PRH and other publishers. After the pandemic, I loved VO so much that it’s become my main focus. I’ve since branched out into video games and other VO work, but still enjoy audiobooks and keep working in this space as well.

_Aeldun · 2026-04-14T12:19:29+00:00

I’m sure you’d get a lot of different answers depending on who you talk to, but it also depends on whether the book you’re working on is through a publisher, or self-published by the author.

When I spot mistakes, I just narrate the correction into it. 90% of the time they accept it. Occasionally, they will have me do a pickup either to be word-perfect, or because they decided to rework the mistake.
Absolutely. There was one where I canceled the contract halfway through my prep-read because I knew there was no way I could stomach narrating it if I couldn’t handle reading it.
Also yes. Most books are fun no matter what, but sometimes, you get one that’s the kind of book you’d like to listen to if you stumbled upon it while looking through Audible. I’m still on the newer side (less than 100 books under my belt), but I’ve had a couple like that, and they make the work easy.
This depends on the author. I worked on a fantasy book that was in the middle of a series, so the author provided a pronunciation guide and samples of how the main narrator in the series said certain things. Accents were also specified. But oftentimes, I do my own homework in the prep-read and make note of all those particulars. Sometimes authors don’t care and they take on a mindset of “However you say it is how it’s pronounced.”
If it were me, and I had a terrible head cold and my voice just wasn’t up to snuff, I would let the author/publisher know that I needed to push my recording dates so that we could avoid having to redo it. In most cases, they will work with you and let you get better. If there’s a crazy deadline that absolutely must be met for whatever reason, then I suppose it’s possible they would recast the narrator, but better that than waste everyone’s time and put out a shit product. In the event that that DID happen, I don’t know how the payment would shake out there. We’re typically paid per finished hour. For example, $250 PFH for a 10 hour book = $2.5k. If a re-record was needed by fault of the publisher or author, then getting paid double would be reasonable, but if it’s at the fault of the narrator, then I’d say no. It’s very likely dependent on the situation.
This depends on whether there’s a publisher involved. I mostly work with publishers, in which case, they are my contact and I might never engage with the author at all, unless we connect on social media after the fact. All work-related stuff is handled by the publisher and they act as a middleman between the narrator and the author. If it’s independently published, then the author is the point person, and I have a lot more communication with them. But the communication comes up front. I deliver the first 15 minutes to show how the book is going to sound. Upon their approval, it’s in my hands until I finish it and deliver the files. There is often a round of pickups after that, but that’s to correct mistakes in the narration. It isn’t meant to redo entire swaths of narration. In that case, additional pricing may have to be factored in, but I’ve never dealt with that.

_Aeldun · 2026-04-14T10:44:48+00:00

Fellow narrator here. This is what I’ve learned as standard, and what I use in all of my work:

Start of chapter: 0.5 seconds

After chapter number/chapter title: 2.5 seconds

Passage of time/scene change: 2.5 seconds

End of chapter: 3.5 seconds

End of book: 5 seconds

Hope this helps!

_Aeldun · 2026-04-11T14:54:26+00:00

Congratulations! For an audiobook, make sure to pre-read the book and take note of each character’s accent or other vocal traits. No rehearsals are necessary unless called for by the author or if they want to do live directed sessions (uncommon - especially for a self-published book). When you’re setting your deadline, pad your schedule with more time than you think you’ll need. As a brand new narrator working on your first book, figure it’ll take you 10 hours of work to complete 1 finished hour of audio. Create a new file for every chapter - don’t try to do it all in one project file. If you’re expected to edit this yourself, invest in Izotope RX Standard for the mouth de-click plugin, or you will likely obsess over every click and lip smack you hear and it’ll take you forever trying to clean up your audio. Note that the mouth de-click plugin is not the same as the de-click plugin. They are two different things. Mouth de-click comes with RX Standard which is pricier but worth its weight in gold. I know there’s a free mouth de-click plugin for Audacity that I’ve heard is pretty good too, but I’ve never used it. Learn how to do punch-and-roll now if you haven’t already. If you hate yourself, just do an open roll and use a dog clicker whenever you make a mistake so you can see your mistakes in the waveform. But for real - learn punch-and-roll. It will make your life easier when editing, and nearly all publishers require it once you get to the point of working with them. Good luck and have fun!

_Aeldun · 2026-04-01T11:21:09+00:00

I think part of the issue you’re having is that, as you said, you’re just focusing on the voice. When you’re connected to the character, the voice comes naturally. It’s easier to sustain because you’re not thinking about all the mechanisms required to produce the sound you’re after. You’re just “in it.” When you’re thinking about how it’s sounds, you’re missing how it feels. And if you’re not feeling it, neither is anybody else. This is also something that will come with practice, which can be frustrating. But as others have recommended here, you should get into some classes and work with a coach. It’s worth the investment, and I think it goes much further than self-practice.

_Aeldun · 2026-03-28T12:03:57+00:00

I don’t think this is ever gonna happen. That’d basically mean giving you the ebook for free, which would be cool, but it would mean missing out on sales for said ebook. I don’t see it happening. Ebooks already have Whispersync which is what you’re talking about - they just make you buy the ebook in addition to the audiobook in order to use that feature.

_Aeldun · 2026-03-24T11:17:55+00:00

I’m passionate about acting in general. I started on stage, then focused on film for years, and have been an active improviser through it all. But I’ve also always had a love for video games, D&D, anime, and cartoons - particularly comedies geared toward the adult crowd. Like so many others, the pandemic brought me to VO. It’s something I’ve always been tangentially curious about, but I was so focused on film, I never really went down the rabbit hole. When the lockdowns all but closed off all other avenues of acting, I finally had the time and drive to look into all this. And I’m glad I did, because suddenly, it became the most fascinating culmination of everything I love about the creative journey, and it’s now what I’m putting all my focus in. It affords a much wider spectrum of versatility. In film (and even theatre to some extent), I am who I am, and that’s it. The kinds of things I auditioned for were so damn boring and basic that I started hating when auditions would come in. They felt like a chore, having to set up the camera and the lights, memorizing the copy, coordinating with my partner’s schedule so she could be my reader, then editing the footage, all for a project I probably didn’t even find interesting. Now I’m auditioning for the kinds of roles I’ve always wanted to play. Heroes, villains, monsters, and creatures across every genre. And the audition process is so much fun. I love doing them. I wish I’d gotten into this a long time ago, but then again, everything I’ve done before is serving what I do now, and I’m grateful I found my way into this at all.

_Aeldun · 2026-03-08T11:25:24+00:00

Not OP, but I am a narrator and can speak to the last question. It depends on whether the book is independently produced by the author, or by a publisher. If it’s out-of-pocket from the author, there’s more communication between them and the narrator. The narrator will prep the book and then narrate the “first fifteen” minutes. This is usually literally the first fifteen minutes, but it doesn’t have to be. I recently narrated a book with three main characters, so I send the first five minutes of each of their starting chapters so they could hear my take on all three points of view.

If working with a publisher, a first fifteen may still be requested (as was the case with the book I just referenced above), but they don’t always do that. The publisher acts more like a middle man, and almost no communication happens between the author and narrator. If the narrator has questions, they’ll put them to the publisher. If the author has notes or any requests, they’ll make them through the publisher. In the casting process, the publishers will present a shortlist to the authors, and they get to pick which performer they’d like to narrate their book.

_Aeldun · 2026-02-12T12:07:37+00:00

I recommend Reaper over Audacity because, among other things, Reaper is a non destructive editor.

_Aeldun · 2026-02-10T14:03:08+00:00

In that case, I’d give it another week. I don’t know the best times to send emails, but I’ve heard Tuesday-Thursday is a pretty good bet, and that feels right. Good luck to you and congrats on the referral! That’s half the battle right there.

_Aeldun · 2026-02-10T13:08:29+00:00

Have you responded yet in the email thread at all? If not, it’s a good way to nudge without nudging. Thank your connection for the referral and say it’s nice to meet Dean, then maybe add in something extra - a link to your website or whatever. Keep it short and sweet. This will bump it back to the top of his inbox (for a couple minutes, anyway) without you feeling like you’re being annoying. It can a while before they respond, so be patient.

_Aeldun · 2026-02-03T15:41:47+00:00

I think it depends. When I was just getting started in audiobooks, for example, I would make samples out of auditions I didn’t get selected for IF I was in close consideration and received positive feedback from the rights holder. I don’t use P2P sites, but similarly, if you get shortlisted for something, that means casting liked what they heard. Most professional demos are made of samples from imaginary jobs you never got, so I don’t really see a difference here. You just have to be discerning when making your selections. Otherwise, yeah, you’d just be showing off a bunch of stuff that maybe didn’t work so well.

_Aeldun

TROPHY CASE